Many years ago, many many years ago (before Bruce I-can-tilt-my-head-and-squint-at-the-same-time Willis’ Armageddon), when Star Movies had the balls to play some real cinema for Indian audiences, they managed to run a sci-fi classic called Dark Star. Created by John Carpenter and Dan o' Bannon in the days before they met Kurt Russell and the m^%#$fuckin Alien respectively, Dark Star was a school project turned cult film.
The movie revolved around the inter-galactic travels(travails?) of the unglamorous spaceship Dark Star and its haggard crew. Their job - to boldly take their spaceship where no toy has gone before and destroy unstable planets with smart-ass bombs and baby-sit a polka-dotted beach-ball alien along the way. The movie had low-budget sets and rather primitive graphics (although the narrative hardly suffers for lack of visual support); a cast that included Dan O’ Bannon (that's how low-budget) - all mashed together with a kick-ass whacky script.
Sample this – An intuitive bomb (Bomb #20) with a Cartesian disposition, discovers its true purpose in life after getting a crash course in phenomenology from a crew member, who does so in order to stop the bomb from exploding within the ship, and is acting on the advice of a dead and cryogenically frozen ex-captain, who is understandably feeling lonely. Fuck yeah!
It is precious and just goes to prove that having Americans bombing the world (you know like real-life) can make better cinema than having them saving the world. Again. And Again.
In one word, the movie is "friggin awesome". Ok, two words. I wanted to write more words, but as usual, once you read Ebert's review on something, you kinda quit that idea on account of feeling small. Note to self: Next time you want to write about a movie, do not read Ebert's review of the same prior to the initiation of writing. Simple.
But I have one memory of this movie that Ebert doesn’t have a clue about. The first time I watched the movie, I had no clue about its cult status. In fact, I came upon the movie when it was close to rolling credits. It was ending with a song. A sweet little ditty that caught my ear and refused to let go. I waited for a rerun of the movie just to hear the song. And when it came, I grabbed it on compact cassette tape (Yes TAPE!) with the aid of an ancient recorder. It even recorded the sounds of a sunday afternoon and mixed it with one special Bhangaaarwaaaleeeeeeyyyaaaaaa...Baatli Bhangaaarwaaaleeeeeeyyyaaaaaa....
The special remix tape may be lost to fungus, but the song lives. The song was Benson, Arizona. It still is happily enough the same Benson, Arizona.
Benson, Arizona, the same stars in the sky
but they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I…
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